an honest and poetic approach
to death care
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God
the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have
discovered fire.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
My name is Narinder Elizabeth Bazen. (she/her)
Being a death midwife in troubled times is an interesting lifestyle. This part I’m playing asks me to live in the balance between diligence and devotion, for sure, and it requests my willingness to stay with Inspiration while grieving. As an artist, advocate and animist, I braid death midwifery through culture midwifery through grief midwifery – laureling the hopes I have for our humanity and the big ideas I have for folks who are dying and the people who love them.
My death midwifery grew out of an ask from my gorgeous community in a gritty southern city. My presence has been requested by families, communities, and individuals to conversations about terminal diagnosis, death anxiety, Home Funerals, spiritual death care, burials, death education, murder and suicide, as well as collective and personal grief care. My death work has been experienced by vastly different demographics.
I have witnessed the way our current death care systems fail medical professionals, caregivers, dying people, and funeral industry workers.
With my eyes wide open, I walk with light regardless. May my creativity and passion help to bring new paradigm death care into being.
When I am not working with my death midwifery, I am enjoying much time outdoors on the beautiful land that belongs to Wabanaki People (Maine), or listening to old jazz, writing poetry, drawing with watercolors and pencils (all illustrations on this website were drawn by me! ), cuddling up with my dog Oak, or romanticizing a new world where we all get to thrive, be nourished, seen, and safe.
What is Culture Midwifery?
As a death midwife, I believe that new death work redefines our collective death values and manifests them in our choices about how we wish to experience the end-of-life and also how we wish for all people to get to have death with dignity. It also invites us to live in death awareness, understanding the preciousness of life. Through death work, we return love to its fullest expression by lifting grief to its rightful place. In these mindsets, we imagine new paths to healing for ourselves and the planet and all people on it. Living in this death awareness, the grief void within us is no longer filled with over-consumption, individualistic living, and harm to others, but rather living in this death awareness we come back to what it means to be a human being. Living in death awareness is a big ole invitation to simplify, be present, and create.
Exploring and acting upon these values and choices, we remember death midwifery.
Remembering death midwifery, we give life to the world we long to see.